The Sunderbans Tiger Reserve (STR) area of West Bengal will now be monitoring its tiger population through an impressive 1200 cameras. The move is a part of the All-India tiger estimation exercise.
Last year, 400 cameras were placed in the West Bengal area of the Sunderbans, to estimate the number of tigers. Sunderbans, which extends from South 24 Parganas to Khulna of Bangladesh is home to the Royal Bengal tigers, the only known mangrove-dwelling tiger species of the world.
Thus the Bengal tiger is often counted as a charismatic mega-fauna of both India and Bangladesh. These are large animal species often cited as the flagship fauna of a place and hold widespread popular appeal and are thus the main subjects of conservation programs.
The tiger census in India was historically conducted through the popular foot marking technique. In this technique, plaster casts were made of tigers’ paw marks and then compared to the other paw mark casts for estimating the number of tigers. But this method being prone to error and not able to give an exact estimate of the numbers, was gradually replaced by the more modern cameras trap technique.
In the camera trap technique, cameras are fitted with a motion or infra-red sensors and uses a light beam as trigger. Whenever any wild animal passes through the light beam, a count is recorded. The cameras take several hundred photos of the tigers and then individual tigers are differentiated from each other on the basis of difference in their stripes.
The cameras are being placed across all the four ranges – Sajnekhali, Basirhat, National Park East and National Park West – of the STR and this is the first time that the cameras are being installed in the entire area at a go, a report in The Times of India said.
Of the 1200 cameras, 400 were supplied by the forest department and the rest by World Wild Fund for Nature’s India chapter. The tiger counting will continue for a month. For placing the cameras, the entire Sunderbans area will be divided into two-kilometre grids and each grid will have two cameras. The cameras will become operational from December 16.
The Sunderbans delta is presently home to around 200 tigers with around 88 of them belonging to the Indian side of the delta. There has been a steady rise in the number of tigers since 2014, mainly because of the conservation efforts in the areas outside of the tiger reserve.
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